Unattached Women Raising Cain: Spinsters Touching Orphans in Anne of Green Gables and Uncle Tom’s Cabin

“It is your system makes such children,” said Miss Ophelia.

“I know it; but they are made,—they exist,—and what is to be done with them?”

—Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 236

Just as abolitionist author Harriet Beecher Stowe urged readers of Uncle Tom’s Cabin to “feel right” and abolish slavery one reformed conscience at a time, so, too, authors showed how adopting a child reforms the nation one family at a time.

—Carol Singley, Adopting America: Childhood, Kinship, and National Identity in Literature, 86

L. M. Montgomery’s 1908 Anne of Green Gables establishes Anne Shirley as an active participant in many literary traditions. Anne is an expressive reader who acts out romantic poetry and takes pleasure in popular Gothics (Robinson, “Anne and Her Ancestors”). However, Anne’s story of earning kinship with Marilla Cuthbert, her caregiver, is actually underscored by a deeply woven and unnamed intertext, which holds stunning implications. Montgomery used Uncle Tom’s Cabin, in particular the popular Topsy character who unsettles the New England spinster Miss Ophelia, to frame Marilla’s response to Anne. In fact, Marilla’s early repulsion to Anne—the orphan “mistake” imposed on her by her brother Matthew— mirrors Aunt Ophelia’s disgust at Topsy, whom her cousin Augustine St. Clare has purchased specifically for her. Just as the transformation of the racist Aunt Ophelia into a loving guardian preoccupies the New Orleans section of Uncle Tom’s Cabin and serves as model for reforming the abolitionist reader who harbors racism, the primary drama of Anne of Green Gables is Anne transforming the spinster Marilla from an emotionally repressed woman to a loving partner for the energetic orphan. Not only does the analogy of the slave orphan underscore Anne’s entrapment in a system that traffics children and bears visceral prejudice; the parallel growth in the spinsters, who assert their independence and empower themselves to protect the girls, also suggests broader implications in social reform and feminism.

The slave Topsy is both a stereotypical pickaninny and more. She provides racist comedy in the middle section of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, as she did later in the minstrel shows (Meer). The comedy derives from Topsy’s unique ability to test and challenge the ironically nicknamed “Miss Feely,” which she does by asserting her sinfulness and embracing the role of “nigger” as excuse for her refusal to conform. Topsy is wickedly smart and clever, showing, like Anne, a natural intelligence expressed in play, which disrupts Miss Ophelia’s Yankee sense of domestic order. Topsy is naturally skilled at letters and proper housekeeping, but when left alone she transforms Miss Ophelia’s chamber into a theater of mischievous play. She quickly becomes a house favorite, amuses Augustine St. Clare, faces prejudice despite her good intentions with Eva, and is finally transformed and touched by Eva’s Christian love. Her ultimate adoption by Miss Ophelia bears the urgency of a national question—can northern women adopt the issue of abolition as their own? After immense power struggles with her guardian, Topsy enables Miss Ophelia to seize authority and power over St. Clare; Miss Ophelia demands Topsy’s papers from her laissez-faire cousin, vowing protection and education for her ward.

If the spinster figure stands apart from white patriarchy by virtue of her unmarried state, the freeing of Topsy and the adoption of all she represents establish the political agency and awakening of Miss Ophelia. Miss Ophelia brings Topsy back to New England to the “surprise” of “the folks,” which is where Anne of Green Gables starts. If Miss Ophelia’s discomfort at the goblin-like “heathen,” whom it is her “duty” to reform, sounds familiar to readers of Montgomery, it should. Whereas adoption in literature maps a terrain of social reform by integrating the orphan into the family, the parallel adoptions of Topsy and Anne Shirley mark social challenges as much as possibilities. They register both the possibilities of the quare child, excluded from citizenship through race, class, and sexuality, and the spinsters who...